The Eucharist as Sacrifice, pt. 2

11-24-2024Weekly ReflectionThe Faithful Disciple

After Noah, the human race became one more a dysfunctional family. Chapter 11 of Genesis tells us that the whole earth had only one language and that the people joined together in a great project to build a city at the center of which would be a tower reaching up to challenge the heavens. This Tower of Babel functions as a neat biblical image of the aggressive, self-aggrandizing, and imperialistic tendencies of human beings once they have lost contact with God.

We ought not to read these Genesis tales, of course, as straightforward history, but rather as densely textured symbolic narratives that express, with admirable economy, the fundamental features and aspects of sin: violence, arrogance, division, blaming, deception, lust for power, and murder. However, as we saw in the last chapter, the God of justice will not rest. In the scriptural reading, he sets himself the task of saving his compromised creation, and the principal means that he chooses is the formation of a people who would learn to walk in his ways and would become thereby a light to all the nations. Just after the story of the Tower of Babel there commences the great narrative concerning Abram of Ur, the father of the nation of Israel. The first thing we hear about Abram is that he is called by the Lord. The essential problem began with disobedience, and thus the solution must begin with obedience. Eve and Adam became rebels; Abram must, accordingly, became a servant. He is being told to uproot his entire life and to move, with his family, to a distant land he knows nothing about—and he is, we are informed, seventy-five years old. To cling to godliness, in the manner of our first parents, is to claim lordship over one’s own life; to surrender to God is to realize that one’s life is not one’s own, that a higher and more compelling voice commands. In all of this, we sense that friendship with God (a covenant with him) would involve sacrifice, the abandonment of the self, and we begin to see the spiritual importance of this juxtaposition, for God’s promise to Abram involves what I’ve been calling the loop of grace. If Abram can contrive a way to make of his life a gift—if he can sacrifice in trust what God has given to him—then his being will increase. As Abram, in faith, sets out with his family, the long pedagogy begins. The rest of the biblical narrative, up to and including the story of Jesus, is the account of God’s formation of the clan of Abram, a people after his own heart, and this education will center around the intertwined themes of covenant and sacrifice. In chapter 15 of Genesis, Abram hears, once again, the divine promise that he will become a great nation, his descendants more numerous than the stars of the sky, but then he, reasonably enough, complains about being childless. In answer, God gives a series of peculiar commands to bring various animals. He then instructs Abram to cut these animals in two and place them down. As it grew dark, Abram fell into a kind of trance. On that day, Genesis tells us, God made a covenant with Abram, giving the land to his descendants. I realize how odd, even incomprehensible, all of this seems to us. Why should the establishment of a covenant between divinity and humanity be accompanied by a bizarre twilight ceremony involving butchered animals? In order to grasp the matter, we have to abandon our perhaps overly tidy and antiseptic view of God and enter into the far earthier, more elemental world of the biblical imagination.